Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Our treaties, ourselves: the struggle over the Panama Canal

By Natasha Zaretsky
In March 1978, Ada Smith, a fifty-six-year old woman from Memphis, sat down at her typewriter and wrote an angry letter to Tennessee’s Republican Senator Howard Baker. She explained that until recently, she had always been proud of her country, and “its superiority in the world.” But now her pride had turned to fear: “After coming through that great fiasco Vietnam, which cost us billions in dollars and much more in American blood, we are now faced with another act of stupidity, which, in the years to come, could be even more costly.”

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Singing in a choir is like knitting and bingo

By Barbara Stuart
Joining a choir is all the rage and some say that choir memberships are getting younger. It’s like knitting and bingo — it’s cool to sing in a choir. Not in the choirs around here, not yet! Every English choral society has its stalwarts; ladies (sadly mostly ladies — there are never enough men) who run the committee, enjoy a frisson with the young(ish) conductor, share lifts, and find friendship.

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Sudden cardiac death: what about the rest of the family?

By Mattis Ranthe
Sudden cardiac death is internationally defined as sudden, unexpected death due to natural unknown or cardiac causes, with an acute change in cardiovascular status within one hour of death or, in unwitnessed cases, in a person last seen functioning normally within 24 hours of being found dead. In young people it is most often caused by undiagnosed heart problems that may be hereditary, indicating that there may be genetic mutations causing the condition.

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Does the lily grow in the valet? Is good ballet bally good?

By Anatoly Liberman
This post is an answer to a letter I received from our correspondent Jonathan Davis. Not too long ago, I mentioned the differences in the pronunciation of niche: in the speech of most Americans it rhymes with pitch, but the rhyme niche/leash can also be heard, and it seems to be prevalent in Britain. Mr. Davis is an Englishman living in Texas and, not unexpectedly, favors the vowel of ee and sh in niche, while those around him prefer short i and ch.

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Border Control in America before Ellis Island

By Hidetaka Hirota
On the seventeenth of April 1907, 11,747 immigrants arrived in the Ellis Island landing station in New York, marking a record high in terms of the number of people processed on a single day at the station, where 17 million newcomers landed between 1892 and 1954. This arrival was part of a broader landmark immigration wave.

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Sympathy in modernist literature

By Kirsty Martin
In Virginia Woolf’s 1931 modernist novel ‘The Waves’ her character Neville, looking around in a chapel service at school, is suddenly transfixed by his friend Percival: “But look – he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.” Neville is captivated, and overwhelmed, by Percival’s gesture here. Capturing this moment, Woolf’s language becomes gesturative too…

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Portraying Dusty Springfield on stage and in film

By Annie Randall
As I celebrate the late Dusty Springfield’s 74th birthday on the 16th of April, I am struck by the number of singers who choose to perform as Dusty—complete with wigs, costumes, and the trademark hand gestures—rather than singing Dusty’s hit songs as themselves. It’s no surprise that ambitious and confident singers want to sing Dusty’s hits; many of the songs, like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and “The Look of Love,” are not only beautifully crafted, they’re vocally challenging

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A National Poetry Month reading list from Oxford World’s Classics

In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Poetry Month by selecting some of our bilingual poetry editions. In each of the below books, the poems are laid out as parallel texts, with the original language on the left and the English translation on the right. This means that you can enjoy the works either in the original language, in translation, or even compare the two.

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A vegetable wonder!

By Tatiana Holway
With headlines and taglines and raves such as these fanning out from Fleet Street in the autumn of 1837, it would be hard to overestimate the sensation surrounding the immense water lily found earlier that year in the remote South American colony of British Guiana and subsequently named Victoria regia in honor of the empire’s newly crowned queen.

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Our Henry James

By John Carlos Rowe
As we anticipate the public release this year of Scot McGehee’s and David Siegel’s film, What Maisie Knew, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 7 September 2012, I wonder once again what drives popular fascination with Henry James’s fiction in our postmodern condition? Of course, I love Henry James and have spent much of my scholarly career reading, teaching, and writing about his works.

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Henry Moseley and a tale of seven elements

By Eric Scerri
This year marks the 100th anniversary of a remarkable discovery by an equally remarkable scientist. He is Henry Moseley, whose working career lasted a mere four years before he was killed in World War I shortly before his 26th birthday. Born in 1887 in England, Moseley came from a distinguished scientific family. 

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The long, withdrawing roar of Matthew Arnold

By Jane Garnett
Matthew Arnold is probably now most recalled for one phrase, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in his poem “Dover Beach” (first published in 1867), and for having written the lectures which were published serially and then in book form (1869) as Culture and Anarchy. Both are cited more than considered, and the nature of Arnold’s cultural project is often misunderstood.

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Discovering the hermit in the garden

By Gordon Campbell
For many years, answering polite enquiries about my current book project was relatively easy: I could explain that it was about Milton, or the Bible, or Renaissance art and architecture, or the decorative arts, or whatever might be the topic, and the conversation could happily proceed to more interesting subjects. For the past few years, however, I have had to say that I was writing a book about ornamental hermits in eighteenth-century gardens.

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Signaling singleness: mating intelligence and Black Day

By Jessica Fell Williams and Glenn Geher
On the 14th of April, single Koreans will signal their singleness by wearing, eating, and experiencing “black” as a statement on the nature of being single. From the perspective of mating intelligence, following mating-relevant customs that are specific to one’s culture is crucial in mating.

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Celebre a Semana Nacional da Biblioteca com a OUP

Celebre a Semana Nacional da Biblioteca com acesso gratuito ao OED e à Oxford Reference, disponível para todos na América do Norte e do Sul até 20 de abril. Todas as pessoas terão acesso através do mesmo logon, sem necessidade de registro. Estamos liberando essa quantidade inédita de conteúdo da OUP em agradecimento a todo o trabalho vital que os bibliotecários realizam para apoiar seus patronos e em celebração à semana que honra as bibliotecas.

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Celebre la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas con OUP

Celebre la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas con acceso gratuito al OED y Oxford Reference, disponible para América del Norte, del Sur y el Caribe hasta el 20 de Abril. Visite cualquiera de los sitios Web y utilice libraryweek como nombre de usuario y contraseña para acceder a todo el contenido que los sitios tienen que ofrecer. Todo el mundo tendrá acceso a través del mismo nombre de usuario y contraseña y no se requiere ningún registro.

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